Sunshine on Leith

Yesterday I was in Edinburgh for a UCISA Executive meeting. It's a lovely place, but a long way to go on the train - just under 4 hours each way. Still, the journey is one my favourites in the UK - past Durham Cathedral, the Angel of the North, Alnmouth, Berwick on Tweed, and the wonderful bit where the train runs so close to the sea. And I do get lots of work done on the journey. Had to go up the night before, and stayed in Leith, because Edinburgh was full!

I only know Leith because it's where the movie Trainspotting is set (despite in being filmed mainly in Glasgow), but it was very different to how I envisaged it. This was my view on a quick walk before breakfast this morning.

We had the meeting in the Edinburgh School of Art Boardroom - definitely a room with a view, and apparently a location for a number of movies! This is not a good picture, but might give a flavour of what it was like overlooking Edinburgh Castle!

One of the main items on the agenda today was how we present ourselves to our stakeholders. We have a website of course, and a lot of publications, and we put on loads of events. But how discoverable is our content? We have so much content, but you'd have to know what it was and where it was to find it. And we only have one "view' onto our website. No matter who you are, you come in to the same place. Our discussions today were very reminiscent of the ones we're having in Sheffield about our own website.

We also looked at progress on a number of projects, including a toolkit on Designing Learning Spaces. UCISA's toolkits are a great resource for the sector. Recent ones include one on Major Project Assurance, and one on Information Security Management.